BRONX BEER HALL • BELMONT, BRONX

[The Bronx Beer Hall is part nine in a series of sneak peeks from the chapters of my book Bars, Taverns and Dives New Yorkers Love (Rizzoli Publishing.) You can order it online at Powell’s, Amazon, from Rizzoli and Barnes & Noble.]

The Bronx Beer Hall is a very New York kind of place. First of all, it’s in the middle of a mostly Italian marketplace, in the middle of a traditionally Italian neighborhood. Then you’ve got these two Puerto Rican brothers, go-getters working with a local, semi-famous food guy to bring a good idea to fruition, shaking things up, changing something old and good into something even better. It’s Bronxy. It’s New Yorky. It’s a hell of fun place to visit.

Here’s what it’s like: you walk into the Arthur Avenue Retail Market, through French doors, and once inside, you’re immediately engulfed by it all. It’s a big, open carnival of 10 different shops, with all their different counters and signs and flags and customers young and old, and food, food, food. Cheese galore, hundreds of colorful boxes of pasta, bottles of olive oil in dozens of shapes and sizes, and the occasional whole lamb or goat head, traditional favorites from the butcher. Aromas come at you like a commuter rush: fresh bread, fresh produce, fresh mozzarella, fresh sausages. Stuff for sale: over here you’ve got hand-rolled cigars, over there you’ve got wiseguy T-shirts with “Godfather” jokes, and over there, that guy? That guy’s making sandwiches to order as big as Sylvester Stallone’s head, I swear ta God. Big as his freakin’ head.

It’s an opera of sounds bouncing around under that 20-foot ceiling: carts rolling and rumbling, cash registers beeping and bipping, people calling out orders over high counters, and behind it all, strains of doo-wop, Sinatra and old-school soul. In the middle of this delicious chaos, there’s an oasis. Right in the heart of the market, under the skylights, you’ll find a freestanding, conventional-looking wooden bar that seats about a 10, and a dozen or so long wooden tables with benches, the seating at a food court with an embarrassment of culinary riches in every direction: hot Sicilian-style pizza, spicy soppressata heroes, fresh cannoli, and then there’s that cold, local beer.

Next up: the Brooklyn Ice House of the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, another chapter of my book Bars, Taverns and Dives New Yorkers Love, which you can order right here. Limited-edition signed prints of each featured bar are available here.